Needs

There are two main kinds of needs of a human being: physical needs, or the basic needs for subsistence or survival; and psychological needs. The main physical needs for survival are food, shelter, and clothing. There are many psychological and emotional needs, including love, affection, care, leisure, creativity, equality, security, self-esteem, identity, and respect.

Abraham Maslow in his pyramid of needs starts with the basic items of food, water, and shelter, and then the need for safety and security, belonging or love, self-esteem, and finally, personal fulfillment.

While physical needs essentially standardize human status, the psychological needs have direct relevance to self-value and esteem. Every human being desires to be accepted and supported by others. Fulfillment of these needs contributes significantly to safety and security of human beings by avoiding problems such as anxiety, depression, or loneliness.

The nonfulfillment of many physical needs are portrayed as poverty, which in fact is the lack of basic human needs, such as clean water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing, and shelter because of the inability to afford them.

Poverty is the silent killer of poor people, who cannot afford their basic needs and who cannot negotiate preventable diseases and illness. The poor people who do not have access to basic needs are worried most of the time only about how to fulfill their basic needs; they do not have time actually to think of their psychological needs, or one can say that their poverty and scarcity of basic needs lands them emotionless. As Manfred Max-Neef said, poverties are not only poverties—they are more than that, as poverty generates pathologies.

In today’s world, a significant number of populations are striving to provide for their physical needs. Millions of people around the world die due to the scarcity of food each year. Similarly, thousands of others die because they lack shelter in extreme weather conditions. Millions of people on Earth have no access to proper clothing in accordance with particular weather. Similarly, many people die because of hunger. People living in the worst of weather conditions in the deserts under souring temperatures are compelled to travel many miles barefoot to fetch water from wells. In most of the third world countries, due to the extreme poverty, children go to bed without eating and most of them die due to the malnourishment.

Lous Tay and Ed Diener contributed that in almost all regions of the world basic needs are important for life evaluation. Further, in their view, social needs and respect are also important for positive feelings.

Positive feelings are closely linked or part of psychological needs that are as essential as the physical needs for human beings. Poor people, in addition to their basic needs, also need love, affection, care, and attention. People who hardly manage to fulfill their basic needs still worry about their psychological needs.

[Page 1123]Most of the people who migrate from their native lands do so for their survival. And many young adults leave their homes to go abroad in order to feed their families for their survival. This is an example of people who are working day and night away from their families and deprived of their psychological needs in order to fulfill their basic needs. Psychological needs are not only associated with the people who do not have their basic needs, but also with those who are struggling for them. People from all social strata are worried about their psychological needs. Lack of family structure in most cultures—where elderly people are thrown out of their homes or sent to homes for the aged and other factors like high divorce rates and frequent separations in families—tends to have a negative impact on society and especially on the children of those families.

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